Russia-Ukraine war live: three Russian bomber aircraft shot down, says Kyiv | Ukraine

Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.

You can read a selection below:

Mr Fifty Percent: the former Ukraine mayor doing Putin’s work

The Russians were Volodymyr Saldo’s salvation. The wealthy Ukrainian in his 50s had done a stint in the national parliament and won three terms as the mayor of the southern city of Kherson, but at the start of 2022 police had opened a case against him for ordering a contract killing.

“I wanted to jail him,” Oleksandr Prokudin, Kherson’s police chief at the time and now the city’s governor, told Tom Burgis as he sat in the basement he uses for meetings since the Russians blew the roof off his office.

Detectives had found the intermediary they suspected of sending gangland assassins to shoot one of Saldo’s enemies. And the intermediary had told them it was Saldo who had paid for the hit, Prokudin says. “Then the war happened.”

Today, Saldo is beyond the reach of Ukrainian law. He is once again a powerful politician – Vladimir Putin’s chosen ruler of the occupied territory that lies across the river from Kherson. From there, shells, bombs and mortars rain down ceaselessly on the city he used to run.

A Guardian investigation into Saldo’s regime reveals that, under the banner of Russian nationalism, the invaders and their collaborators appear to be using terror tactics to construct on Ukrainian soil an extension of the gangster state Putin has built at home, where cronies grow rich and dissent is punished.

Continue reading here:

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and military officials said the country’s forces shot down three Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber aircraft on the southern front on Friday, hailing it as a success in the 22-month-old war.

Reuters reports that the Russian military made no mention of the incident. But Russian bloggers acknowledged the loss, and analysts suggested US-supplied Patriot missiles had probably been used.

Air force spokesperson Yuri Ihnat described the downing on national television as a “brilliantly planned operation”.

“There haven’t been Su-34s for some time in our positive statistics,” he said, citing the model as one of Russia’s most modern aircraft for bombing and other assaults.

The Ukrainian air force commander, Gen Mykola Oleshchuk, wrote on the Telegram messaging app:

Today at noon in the southern sector – minus three Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers!

Reuters could not independently confirm the reports.

Zelenskiy, in his nightly video address, praised the Odesa region anti-aircraft unit for downing the planes in Kherson region.

The region was occupied in the first days of Moscow’s February 2022 invasion. Ukrainian forces have sought to regain territory and in November established positions on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson.

Eurasia Daily, a Russia-based journal, said the Ukrainian account was plausible. Kyiv could have launched Patriot missiles, which have a range of up to 160km (100 miles) against high-altitude targets, from the western side of the Dnipro River, it said.

Welcome to our continuing live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war.

In our top story, Ukraine says its forces have shot down three Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber aircraft on the southern front, hailing it as a success in the 22-month-old war.

The Russian military made no mention of the incident. But Russian bloggers acknowledged the loss, and analysts suggested US-supplied Patriot missiles had probably been used.

The report was unable to be independently confirmed.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, praised the Odesa region anti-aircraft unit for downing the planes in the Kherson region on Friday.

More on that story shortly. In other key developments:

• Ukraine shot down 24 of 28 Shahed drones Russia launched in an overnight attack that damaged residential buildings in Kyiv and an infrastructure facility and grain warehouse in southern regions, officials said on Friday. Drones hit three storeys of an apartment block in the Ukrainian capital, injuring two people and causing lesser damage to several other residential buildings.

• Russia said its air defences intercepted five Ukrainian drones south of Moscow in the space of less than an hour. The defence ministry said four were intercepted over Kaluga region and a fifth was destroyed in the Moscow region.

• Russia may sever diplomatic ties with the US if Washington confiscates Russian assets frozen over the Ukrainian conflict, Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, as saying on Friday. The Kremlin said Russia would never leave in peace any country that seized its assets, adding that it would look at what western assets it could seize in retaliation if that occurred. The comments came amid suggestions from some western politicians that frozen Russian assets worth $300bn be handed to Ukraine.

• Russia is ready to swiftly respond in kind to Washington deploying short- and medium-range missiles in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, Ryabkov said. Separately, the deputy foreign minister said Moscow and Washington were still engaged in sensitive negotiations over a prisoner exchange, but accused the US side of leaking details to the media.

• The Dutch government will send 18 F-16 jets to Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced on Friday after a conversation with the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte.

• Police have arrested a senior Ukrainian defence ministry official suspected of embezzling €36m (£31m/$40m) for the purchase of much-needed artillery shells in the war against Russia, according to officials. Prosecutors said on Friday that the official, whose identity they did not reveal, had developed a system under which he bought artillery shells at inflated prices. Ukraine has had a series of corruption scandals in recent months, including several in the defence ministry.

• The US said it would place sanctions on foreign banks that supported Russia’s war in Ukraine, in a new bid to exert economic pressure on Moscow as it diversifies from the west to China.

• The Kremlin accused the Wall Street Journal of publishing “pulp fiction” after it reported that the death of the mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in a plane crash had been orchestrated by a Russian security official, Nikolai Patrushev.

• Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, visited Kyiv on Friday to present an aid package for Ukraine on his first official foreign visit, a ministry spokesperson said.

• The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, held a phone call with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Friday to discuss ways to de-escalate the conflict in Gaza as well as humanitarian relief efforts, the Kremlin said.

• The renowned Russian writer Boris Akunin, who was declared a terrorist by Moscow and became the target of a criminal inquiry this week, says he fears the move signals a new milestone in the country’s history under the Russian president. The writer, who lives in exile, told Agence France-Presse: “Putin’s regime has clearly decided to take a very important new step on its way from a police, autocratic state to a totalitarian state.”